A G7 Summit of Solid Security Success:
Prospects for Togetherness with Trump at Taormina

John Kirton
May 23, 2017

Introduction

On May 26-27, 2017, the leaders of the world's major democratic powers will gather for their 43th annual summit in Taormina, Italy, on Sicily's sunny Mediterranean shores. The event will be hosted by rookie Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni, who assumed his position only a few months before, following his predecessor's referendum defeat. It will be the first serious outing on the world stage for new US president Donald Trump, who has never previously served in government or the military, and who will meet his peers and partners face to face to do the big deals on the economy, development and security that the world badly needs. It will also be the first G7 summit for British prime minister Theresa May, preoccupied with separating from the European Union while keeping her own country together at home. France will have the freshest leader, Emmanuel Macron, chosen by its voters just a few weeks before. With so many newcomers, much will depend on the experienced veterans, above all German chancellor Angela Merkel at her 12th successive G7/8, two of which she hosted, in 2007 at Heiligendamm and 2015 at Elmau. She will be backed by Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, at his sixth, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau at his second, plus EU leaders Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk at their third summit.

Together they will address Italy's carefully prepared formal agenda: first, citizen safety; second, economic, environmental and social sustainability and the reduction of inequalities; and third, innovation, skills and labour in the age of the next production revolution. The first pillar begins with the "management of human mobility," framed not as an economic benefit but a security threat, and covers stability in the proximate sub-Saharan Africa and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and the prevention of terrorism. The second pillar consists on inclusive growth, energy and climate change, food security and nutrition, health, women and girls economic empowerment and education, with the traditional topic of trade not having a place of its own. The third pillar, overlapping the G20's agenda, covers production innovation, knowledge-based capital and enabling infrastructures, and the future of work and welfare systems.

The Debate Competing Schools of Thought

In the lead-up to the summit, the prospects for its performance were the subject of a debate among several competing schools of thought (see Appendix A).

The first school saw "significant geopolitical dialogue" (Hammond 2017). This was due to pressing geopolitical and security problems in Ukraine, European security, instability in the MENA region including Libya, migration from across the Mediterranean, North Korea, and the South and East China Seas. It was also due to disagreements between Gentiloni and Trump on trade and climate change, and the poor preparations by the United States for the event.

The second school prospects for only a small success, for both the G7 and its EU member, due to the severe setbacks from Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, the United Kingdom's 2016 decision to leave the EU, and the advent of a unilateralist, protectionist and unpredictable Donald Trump as president of the United States at the start of 2017 (Wouters and Van Kerchhoven 2017).

The third school saw a barely relevant G7 usurped by the G20 (Reguly 2017). Focused on the meeting of G7 finance ministers and central bank governors in Bari a few weeks before the summit, it argued that "the G7 no longer represents the global power base, though it did play a key role in keeping the financial system intact during the 2008 crisis. The United States, Germany and Japan keep the G7 relevant, though barely so."

Puzzles

Each of these schools present puzzles. None emphasize how the G7 summit is a forum well suited to Trump's personal style — a freewheeling, leaders-driven, format where innovative directions could be spontaneously set and big package deals made. They also overlook how all the lead-up bilateral meetings that Trump had held with G7 leaders — Abe, May, Trudeau and Gentiloni — had produced often unpredicted success, at times in innovative ways. The small-success school neglected the recent successes from the EU in advancing open trade and open societies, with the conclusion of the Canada-EU free trade agreement, and the electoral success of progressive parties in the Netherlands, key German states and France.

Thesis

Taormina will thus be primarily security summit, with development and especially the economy taking a secondary place. It will also be a substantially successful summit, with Trump, having learned that he must adjust to and with his real democratic peers to pioneer the badly needed solutions to key global challenges that America alone cannot produce.

The summit will be spurred to success by the recent shocks of deadly terrorist attacks in Nice, Berlin, London, St. Petersburg and Sweden, the deadly chemical weapons attacks on his own innocent citizens by Syrian President Bashir Assad, North Korea's escalating nuclear threats to Japan and the United States, escalating famine in drought-stricken Africa, and possibly a springtime surge in migrants flooding into Europe from across the Mediterranean and territorial provocations by Russia in Europe or others elsewhere. It is on such subjects that the multilateral organizations failure of the United Nations galaxy is most pronounced, with a deadlocked Security Council, no dedicated counter-terrorist organization, and several underfunded Rome-based bodies for food security and famine relief. With all G7 economies again growing reliably, while many of the big emerging ones struggling or declining, G7 members have the capability, confidence and freedom to leave specific economic issues to the G20 summit coming several weeks later, in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7-8. Common political principles will propel cooperation, as no G7 members have yet retreated from their devotion to open democracy and human rights, the way that several other G20 members recently have. Domestic political cohesion will constrain them, as only Japan's Abe and Canada's Trudeau have the high political capital, public support, and personal continuity, competence and conviction that breeds success in this compact, cherished G7 summit club.

The Preparatory Process

The Ministerial Meetings

In their summit deliberations, leaders will build on the firm foundation set by the meetings of their ministers on culture at Florence on March 30-31, energy in Rome on April 9-10, foreign affairs in Lucca on April 10-11, and finance in Bari on May 11-13. After the summit will come those on the environment in Bologna on July 10-11; in Turin on industry and information and communications technologies on September 26-27, science on September 28-29, and labour and employment on September 30-October 1; on agriculture in Bergamo on October 14-15; and on health in Milan on November 5-6.

The energy ministerial meeting in April produced no communiqué, as the United States was still formulating its position on climate change and the Paris Agreement.

The April foreign ministerial meeting did produce a communiqué, containing 141 commitments (see Appendix B). By issue they were led by on terrorism, with 44 commitments or 31% of the total, regional security with 19 or 14%, peace and security with 14 or 10%, non-proliferation with 13 or 9%, international cooperation with 10, and gender and health with seven or 5% each. The ministers also produced one commitment each on the environment and climate change.

At the finance ministerial meeting in Bari in early May, the United States prevented the G7 from agreeing on its traditional anti-protectionist pledge, as it has earlier done at G20 finance meetings in Washington in April and in Germany in March. The United States also prevented any reference in the communiqué to climate finance.

The Sherpa Process

The sherpas held their usual set of four preparatory meetings, the last one before the summit taking place in Rome on May 15-16 to try to finalize the communiqué. Their progress was slowed by lack of clarity from the US about what its president's positions would be. They would meet again in Taormina just before their leaders gather there.

The Compliance Cadence

The Taormina leaders will also be bolstered by the confidence that comes from their solid compliance with the 19 priority commitments they made at their summit in Ise-Shima, Japan last year (G8 Research Group 2017). Their overall final compliance score of 73% exceeded the 69% they had earned the previous year. Compliance with the Ise-Shima commitments was led by the issues of the Paris Agreement on climate change and regional security-maritime security, both at 100%, cybersecurity at 94%, and health and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, terrorist finance, and Syrian refugees all at 88%. Close to the summit average were food and agriculture at 81%, and gender issues on career development, the Addis Tax Initiative and counterterrorism each at 75%. At the bottom were the climate change issue of the Montreal Protocol at 50% and the gender issue of women's engagement in emergency response situations at a failing grade of 19%.

By country, compliance was led by the European Union at 83%, followed in turn by the United States at 82%, Canada at 79%, Germany at 75%, the United Kingdom at 71%, Japan at 64%, France at 63%, and Italy at 61%. It is noteworthy that Brexit did not prevent the EU from maintaining its usual top-ranked compliance performance. Even more noteworthy is that the second-placed United States complied highly with its commitments agreed to by a lame-duck president Barack Obama, both when he was still in office and after the inauguration of Donald Trump.

The Set-up Summits

Three sets of summits lay the ground for the leaders' encounter at Taormina. The first was the traditional pre-summit tour taken by Gentiloni as host to meet with all his summit partners, culminating with a trip to Paris on May 22 to meet Macron. The second was Trump's immediate pre-summit tour, as his first venture abroad, to Saudi Arabia for meetings with the king, the Gulf Cooperation Council and Muslim leaders on May 20-21, to Israel on May 22, to Palestine on May 24, to the Vatican and Italy on May 24, to Brussels to meet the EU leaders and Macron and join the third summit — of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — on May 25, before heading to Sicily for the G7 summit on May 26-27. Trump's tour and the NATO summit strongly set up Taormina to be a security summit, especially on terrorism, the Middle East Peace Process, and Russia and Ukraine.

Prospects for Summit Performance

At the summit itself, leaders will focus first on their long list of pressing security subjects and produce a substantial success. They will unite in their fight against terrorism, from ISIS in Syria and elsewhere, and stand firm against Russia on Ukraine and beyond, while again offering greater dialogue with Russia should it change its course. They will equally show solidarity against North Korea's escalating nuclear and missile threats, endorsing sanctions and calling on Russia and especially China to do more. They will promise to assist the embattled governments of Libya and Afghanistan. They may again offer support for the rule of international law in the South and East China Seas, although the US desire to accommodate China over North Korea may lead to a much weaker statement than Japan's Ise-Shima Summit had produced.

On sustainable development, achievements will be mixed. There will be general support for the 2030 Agenda's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and action on food security, perhaps with concrete commitments to meet the current famine in Africa and advance the ambitious goals agreed at Elmau in 2015 and at L'Aquila in 2009. Specific agreements on gender equality will be made, including on women's entrepreneurs, a subject that Trump agreed to, and his daughter Ivanka led at his bilateral summit in February 2017 with Justin Trudeau.

On the economy and finance, only small success will come. The leaders are unlikely to issue a clear anti-protectionist pledge or endorse further trade liberalization in any specific form. On macroeconomic policy, tax, infrastructure and the digital economy, they are likely to repeat what their finance ministers said the week before.

Causes of Performance

Shock-Activated Vulnerability

The summit will be spurred to success by recent shocks, especially deadly ones within G7 members, coming largely in the security sphere. The lists contains the deadly terrorist attacks in Nice, Berlin, London, St. Petersburg and Sweden, the deadly chemical weapons attacks on his own innocent citizens by Syria's President Assad, North Korea's escalating nuclear threats to Japan and the United States, a springtime surge in migrants flooding into Europe from across the Mediterranean, famine in drought-stricken Africa, and health threats erupting from Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, cholera in Yemen, and Zika in the Americas and United States. There may also be territorial provocations by Russia in Europe or others elsewhere.

The first shocks come from terrorism, where deadly attacks in the year leading up to the summit had taken place in France, Germany, the UK, Sweden in the EU and nearby Russia (see Appendix C). They culminated in the late evening of Monday, May 22, with the terrorist attack in the UK's Manchester, which killed at least 22 people as they left a concert.

The second shocks come from weapons of mass destruction, with the increasing missile and nuclear weapons tests in North Korea, and Assad's chemical weapons attacks in Syria. The latter had led to an unprecedented, rapid missile strike on the Syrian launch site by Trump's United States.

The third shocks come from migration, with the surge of immigrants coming across the Mediterranean from Africa into Europe as spring turned into summer and the weather and waters warmed. The death rate on this sea route was much higher than on the Syria-to-Greece land route that had dominated in the previous two years. By May 13 there had been a 44% surge from the same period last year to 45,000 into Italy, well above the 181,000 for 2016 as a whole.

The fourth shocks come from food and agriculture in the form of famine afflicting several African states. On May 11 UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres at a conference in London appealed for $900 million in aid for Somalia to prevent an estimated 275,000 children from starving.

The fifth set of shocks come from health. They came first from the ongoing Zika infection centred in Latin America and the Caribbean, but infecting Florida where Donald Trump spends his weekends and elsewhere in the southern United States. A report by the United Nations Development Programme (2017) in early April estimated the economic cost to Latin American and Caribbean countries between $7 billion and $18 billion between 2015 and 2017, with the greatest harm coming in the Caribbean and poorer countries such as Belize and Haiti. Further shocks came on the eve of the summit from the re-emergence of Ebola, now in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the three deaths by May 13 reminded all of the 11,000 who had died in West Africa in 2014-15. There was also an outbreak of cholera in Yemen, which had claimed 315 lives and 29,300 suspected infections by May 19 (Miles 2017).

Multilateral Organizational Failure

In response to these shocks, the multilateral organizations failure of the UN galaxy is most pronounced. The UN galaxy contains a deadlocked Security Council, no dedicated counter-terrorist organization and several underfunded Rome-based bodies for food security and famine relief. Also underfunded and preoccupied with selecting a new director general is the World Health Organization. The UN High Commission for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration are failing to cope with the surge in migration across the Mediterranean or elsewhere. The United Nations Development Programme and World Bank are making slow progress in implementing the SDGs, as are the secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the United Nations Environment Programme in fostering U.S. ratification and overall implementation and improvement of the Paris Agreement. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has no round of trade liberalization underway and was under assault from the Trump administration. In contrast, the International Monetary Fund is doing better than usual in ensuring financial stability, including through participating in a support program for Greece, and in accurately estimating and supporting global economic growth.

This configuration of multilateral organizational failure has led to a greater reliance on plurilateral bodies such as the G7-created or -centred Financial Action Task Force on terrorism, the Financial Stability Board on finance, the International Energy Agency on energy, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on microeconomic and social policy. It also means the G7 summit will be pushed to focus on the areas where multilateral organizational failure is greatest and where its own plurilateral institutional control is greatest, notably security and sustainable development.

Predominant Equalizing Capability

With all G7 economies again growing reliably, while many of the big emerging ones struggle or decline, the G7 members have the capability, confidence and freedom to leave specific economic issues to the G20 summit coming several weeks later, in Hamburg on July 7-8.

Common Principles

Common political principles will propel cooperation, as no G7 members have yet retreated from their devotion to open democracy and human rights, the way that several other G20 members recently have. The absence of Russia since 2014 has strengthened the G7's devotion to democracy, although some doubt the degree to which Trump is personally attached to this principle.

Political Cohesion

Low domestic political cohesion will limit summit success, as only Japan's Abe and Canada's Trudeau have high political control and capital, public support, and personal continuity, competence and conviction.

In the United States, Trump's Republican party control both legislative chambers, but his approval ratings are at historic lows for new presidents and he is embroiled in controversy about his relations with the Russians. In Germany, Merkel governs in coalition with the SDP, whom she will confront in a general election in September, although her approval ratings give her a widening lead, which were confirmed by her CDU party's victories in state elections in Schleswig Holstein and North Rhine Westphalia in the weeks before the summit. In France, Emmanuelle Macron is fresh from a decisive election victory as president but still has to fashion a majority in the National Assembly elections that will take place soon after the summit's end, an outcome that, polls showed, his voters do not prefer. In Italy, Gentiloni lead a caretaker coalition government, with his predecessor Matteo Renzi likely to return to fight the general election due in 2018. In the UK May's governing Conservative Party seem likely to win a decisive majority in the general election she had called for June 8, yet by May 22 her party's lead over the opposition Labour Party had dropped six points to only nine percent.

Continuity is very low, with new leaders coming from Italy as host, the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Seldom before have newcomers outnumbered veterans among the seven members. Merkel at her 12th summit and Abe at his sixth and even Trudeau at his second are the veterans. Personal competence is limited by the lack of government experience of Trump and its small amount from Macron. Personal convictions that could be counted on in a summit context to advance international cooperation are evident only from Merkel, Abe and Trudeau. Trump's persistent personal animosity toward trade liberalization, backed by May's tactical devotion to Brexit, will likely prevent any advance on trade. Overall, never before has a summit faced the unpredictability that Trump brings to Taormina.

Compact Club Participation

Participation in the compact G7 club that its members cherish will strongly propel success, especially as it is a forum highly suited to Trump's informal, frank, spontaneous, innovative style. It allows leaders to bond with one another as individuals and do big deals, including through packages embracing different issues, that only leaders have the comprehensive authority credibly to do. Trump at Taormina will thus seek and probably secure some support for his "Arab NATO" initiative unveiled at his Saudi Arabian Muslim Summit, and advanced at the Brussels NATO Summit. He is likely to remain, with conditions, a ratified member of the Paris Agreement on climate change, as he has delayed his decision until after the G7 summit discussion takes place.

Conclusion

Taormina will thus be substantially successful security summit, with development and especially the economy taking a secondary place. Overall Donald Trump will learn that he must adjust to and with his real democratic peers to pioneer the badly needed solutions to key global challenges that America alone cannot produce.

Wouters, Jan and Sven Van Kerchhoven (2017), "The Role of the EU in the G7 in Times of Anti-Globalization," paper prepared for the 2017 Pre-G7 Summit Conference on "G7 and Global Governance in an Age of Anti-Globalization," LUISS Carli Guido University, Rome, Italy, May 22, 2017.

Domestic political management: # communiqué compliments = the number of favourable references to G7/8 members by name. Spread = number of G7/8 members complimented.

Deliberation: # days = the duration of the summit; # statements = number of official statements issued in the leaders' name; # words = number of words contained in the official statements.

Direction setting: # references to core values = number of references to the G7/8's core values of open democracy, individual liberty and human rights contained in official documents

Decision making: # commitments contained in the official documents.

Delivery: Compliance: compliance with selected commitments assessed as follows: 1975–1989 assessed by George von Furstenberg and Joseph Daniels; 1990–1995 assessed by Ella Kokotsis; 1996– assessed by the G7 Research Group. # commitments: number of commitments assessed. 2016 is draft Final Compliance Scores only.

Development of global governance: # ministerials created = number of institutions at the ministerial level created; # official-level groups created = number of institutions at the officials level created. Institutions created at or by the summit, or during the hosting year, at least in the form of having one meeting take place.

Participation: # members = number of leaders of full members, including those representing the European Community from the start; Russia started as a participant in 1991 and became a full member in 1998; the G4 met in 1974 without Japan and Italy and later that year the G6 (without Canada) met. # participating countries = number of full members plus number of leaders from other countries. # participating international organizations = number of heads of international organizations.